Stump A ChumpScientists use the following as an example of reasoning and...

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]]>Sundog asks a good question below that can extend this Stump/Chump immediate-moment problem to a part two.

“What has this chump stumped is why hunting becomes collaborative and the circle of temperament synchronizes to get the moose and why it APPEARS competitive/unsynchronized in the heat pack? I realize as networked consciousness it is not necessarily competitive, but I do wonder what behavior/energy I am putting my thoughts on top of that makes it appear competitive?” Sundog

Yes it does appear as if the males are competing with each other and that the most dominant one prevails. If this is true, then the male must be thinking something like: “I want to breed with that female and I have to whup that other male in order to do so.” Is that his inner dialogue?

So we know that the males have a sexual pressure that is all consuming and they want to find relief from, but the immediate-moment says they are not thinking about that either. To break it down: (1) What effect do female sex hormones have on the male psyche? (2) We see that the female is walking around slowly and frequently stopping, so what could the female be doing otherwise wherein the males would not be fighting over her? (3) What do #1 and #2 have to do with cooperative behavior in the hunt?

The video below of a “heat pack” cruising the streets of LA West, is often cited on various forums as proof that dominance exists as the controlling principle of canine social structure. But what does this video actually demonstrate?

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]]>If you hold a treat above a dog, 10 out of 10 hungry dogs will quickly learn to sit. If you then hold out a little longer while simultaneously encouraging the dog to “Speak”, 8-to-9 out of ten dogs will quickly do so. Why? — and — How?

(Note that one doesn’t have to “capture” the behavior in some other context in order to “put it on cue” as learning theorists advocate. In fact, in my opinion that would profoundly slow down the learning process. I also want to add that those dogs who are slow to bark, the 2-out-of 10 types, will at some point learn to do so as well, and again without capturing and cueing. So the question remains what is it about the makeup of a dog that compels it to bark?)

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]]>Monty Roberts in his book “The Man Who Listens to Horses” in recounting how he developed his “Join Up” method of training, writes of observing what he termed a dominant mare in a herd of wild horses on the high plains, driving a young stallion out of the herd that had been biting and kicking the other horses. After she chased him away, the mare returned to the herd and stared at the colt until he licked his lips, at which point, on an incremental basis, she relaxed her gaze and stiff body posture and eventually allowed him to return. Thereafter, he was responsive to the other horses “signals” and no longer disruptive. Monty Roberts interpreted the lip licking as a signal of submission, an act of appeasement by the colt that demonstrated its acknowledgment of the rules of the herd. However, given what Pavlov discovered, is there another interpretation? In other words, what was going on in the mind of the young stallion when it was licking its lips?

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]]>I haven’t cared for too many horses over my years, but about ten years ago when carrying buckets of feed to my two horses, I noticed the following which brought me to an important understanding of Pavlov’s research. Guinness and Maggie would at first be milling excitedly in their paddock when they saw me emerging from the shed where the feed was kept, but as I neared the gate they both then got down to some serious hoof stomping and head-bobbing only to desist when their snouts were deep into their respective feed buckets. And when you think about it, this kind of stomping/bobbing behavior is the basis for a lot of horse tricks as in “Mr. Ed,” and especially “Clever Hans” who had the psychology community hoodwinked for a while in the early twentieth century when he would stop stomping as he had arrived at the proper answer to an addition problem posed by a researcher. So my question is, why do horses stomp the ground and also bob their heads up and down when they are excited?

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]]>Thank you for your great answers and I feel each response is a variant of the same underlying phenomenon. In other words, there’s no “reason” why children love seesaws and swings, rather their bodies and minds (just as it is for all living beings) evolved to feel good when (1) riding on a wave and while (2) their animal mind is subliminally referencing their hearts. The periodic rising and falling, acceleration and deceleration averages out into a feeling of weightlessness, and in this state I believe that the neurochemicals and hormones that record a state of tension/stress in body tissues, and are the basis of unresolved emotion as physical memory, dissolve into an overall sensual state via natural opiates that likewise inhabit those same tissues. This is then perceived of as a condition of resonance with the surroundings, and it is pleasurable indirectly because of these hormonal/neurochemical affects, but fundamentally because the environmental inputs have been ingested into the system and converted into a heart like rhythm. Consciousness is a wave, and the heart is its metronome. Given that while swinging on a swing the physical center of gravity rockets from the tip of the toes to the top of the head, all this motion averages out into the anatomical midpoint, the heart region and as a reconciliation of the two brain bipolar mandate. And if the mind’s subliminal focus beam of attention can remain fixated on the heart while riding said wave, this is apprehended as a feeling of flow centered in the heart. This feeling reconciles the two brains divergent agendas. All true feelings have this morphology and what makes a feeling go “bad,” is the collapse of such a frame of reference.

Why the heart? Because it is the most powerful and rhythmic muscle of tension/release and which is ever present and which can therefore sustain the feeling of flow IN INTERPERSONAL INTERACTIONS (if referenced) and which then leads immutably to sociability.

Why is a wave synonymous with sociability? Because consciousness is synonymous with a network, and therefore sociability is a physical/physic manifestation of a network consciousness, a small subset of the overarching pattern. Sociability adds energy to the network by turning physical energies into emotional bonds by way of Pavlovian conditioning most especially during the earliest imprinting phase of life. Turning raw physical energy into feelings for other things adds energy to consciousness, i.e. the network.

Why is consciousness as a wave adaptive? In other words, what good would it do for human beings to evolve a liking for swings and seesaws, why do waves feel good?

Because the anatomy, physiology and neurology of animals is organized so that episodic change can become periodic change thorough a wave function. Life is buffeting an animal from every direction and at intermittent intervals, how to cope? Internalize it as a feeling. In this way, physical, kinetic energy is captured and then is transformed through Pavlovian Conditioning into consciousness, (the dog projects its “self” into an object of attraction) i.e. psychic energy. This adds new energy to the system and also provides a calculus so as to predict where potential energy is going to be. Now, the matter of harvesting that potential energy remains.

Back in the eighties I hired some Portugese masons to build a walkway and a small patio. They did all the digging by hand and when they ran into a big rock that had to be moved, after excavating around it so three or four men could get around it and secure a hand hold, they began to sing. It was beautiful watching and hearing an ancient tune organize their energies so that soon the massive rock began to rock back and forth with increasing intensity until at just the right moment with a great heave it was up and out of the hole and on a sled. Through the song they each know when and how hard they should apply force because they were in sync in time with the song. I learned a very important behavioral principle from watching them work. Mass can be converted into moving energy by virtue of a wave. A wave function allows force to be coupled, amplified and synchronized so that that which does not conduct can be made conductive. This is how energy is harvested. Since consciousness is organized around a wave pattern, then individual’s psychic energies can be coupled and synchronized to increase the application of force around a collectively focused object of resistance. This is why kids like to ride on swings and seesaws, and dogs like to play and go for car rides. Play is how the network works at evolving nature.

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“In one of the Quantum Canine episodes (can’t remember which) you explain a mama dog biting her young not as a correction but as “imprinting fear” so that when they see large prey they know not to go after the strong, healthy ones. Wouldn’t this imply that mama dog is forming an intention, one that also requires her to plan for future run-ins with large prey? If mama dog ISN’T acting with intention and the fear imprint is simply a byproduct of her bite, why does she bite her puppies when they get too rowdy?”

KB: I can better appreciate from your question how a future consequence that is intelligent, can be hard to separate from the concept of intention, but this brings us to the crux of understanding the animal mind as having evolved in order to implement a networked-intelligence, rather than it being a self-contained computational capacity that apprehends change and its surroundings rationally. So let’s ask some questions that might help us deconstruct this behavior; when they’re little cubs and bopping around, the adults don’t “discipline” them, it’s only when they attain a certain age and are capable of a certain disposition that they ATTRACT the fear held within the pack. So what’s happening within the mother’s mind and what has changed in the puppies? A related question that sheds light, is why does a father who was beaten by his father, tend to beat his own son when you would think that such a man would have inordinate compassion for his son given what he experienced? But statistically we know that’s not the case. Is the abusive father motivated by an intention to do something functional, or is there a function in the dysfunction? Can you identify the consistent principle by which the very young have license with the adults, and then they lose it, and to what end? Does the mother know best; and is this something dog owners need to emulate, or understand? Of direct application to this question is the article I wrote some time ago “Why dogs bark at strangers.”

Stump A ChumpScientists use the following as an example of reasoning and...

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]]>“Suppose every mealtime consists of all 3 dogs getting their bowl of kibble. They are full, but after, I have all come round and give a milk bone to Sissy and Red, but not Peanut. At all other treat occasions throughout the day, they all 3 get a treat. If I keep this up, how will it play out?”

Thanks to Burl for today’s stump-the-chump question. Let me answer it by way of contrasting the dog’s mind with the human’s mind and the latter’s capacity to compare a moment or a point of view, with another moment or point of view versus the former’s “group mind” point of view. In other words, I’m going to compare how an immediate-moment, group consciousness frame of reference (the dog)processes inputs of energy in comparison to how a self-contained intellectually driven consciousness (the human) processes inputs of energy.

Imagine that you are working at a job wherein you sit at a desk and perform 4 units of work for $20 per hour. Then out of the blue you are promoted to a new desk where you perform 2 units of work for $40 per hour. The human mind is excited, this is great. I’m getting twice the return on half of the effort, what a deal. Wow, do I have a great boss. He’s very good to me. I really respect and admire him.

But then you become acquainted with your coworkers and in the course of inter-cubicle banter discover that the person sitting at the dest next to you is making $80 per hour for perfoming 1 unit of work. What now do you begin to think? You begin to THINK resentment. Your intellectual mind begins to race. What does my boss really think of me, maybe I’m being a sucker, my work is much more valuable than this measly pay if that slob next to me is getting twice for less. Who does my boss think he is, did he think he could buy my integrity for a measly $40 an hour? Why the nerve of that jerk. I’m outa here.

Meanwhile consider the group mind of the dog. As he makes his way through the world he’s expending 4 units of work for the doggy equivalent of $20 return. And then along comes a new situation and he finds himself experiencing $40 doggy dollars on 2 units of work. Wow, life is grand. Then it eventually becomes known to him (apparently by way of a short-lived burst of human intellectual relativism) that the dog next to him is experiencing $80 dollars of return by performing a mere 1 unit of work. How would he feel? A dog would feel that in order for him to earn $40 dollars for 2 units, the dog next to him must receive $80 for 1 unit. And this would mean that if his boss offered him a raise of $80 for 1 unit, he would say great, but of course for that to happen then the dog next to me must get $160 for 1/2 of a unit otherwise that wouldn’t FEEL right.

Dogs experience everything in terms of a group mind, not as an isolated self equipped with an independent agency of intelligence that takes stock of relative situations in order to compute some sense of the world. So if vibrating at a pitch of 40-to-2 makes the world go round, then whatever vibration others have, that ratio must constantly be maintained so that the world might go round ever faster. A dog’s mind is a circle and if being at his point on the circumference eventually gets him to the center of the circle, THAT’S ALL HE CARES ABOUT. Whatever pitch everyone else was vibrating at, (dogs can feel these pitches because of emotional projection) that precise scale of frequencies must be maintained as new energy comes in order for the feeling to be right. In other words, if dog A gets five biscuits to every biscuit given to dog B, then in dog B’s mind it takes Dog A getting five biscuits in order for it to get the one. If Dog B could think it would think “Thank God for dog A because that biscuit sure did taste good.”

Your dog is the luckiest dog in the world because you care about it. So don’t think guilt. You haven’t done anything wrong. There is no such thing as fairness in nature so don’t beat yourself up because then your dog will HAVE to express a behavior to make you think guilt and to prove you are right. In other words, to maintain the group harmony. Whereas if you treat dogs fairly then you are not creating a circle, you are being abstract and intellectual and a dog can’t feel an intellectual abstraction. DO WHAT YOU WANT. A dog can feel a want. Then however you are and whatever you did is the frequency that made the wheel go round. Keep On Pushing!

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]]>Scientists use the following as an example of reasoning and subterfuge in an animal. A blue jay is in a tree while its fellow blue jays are scavenging some food on the ground below. As a corvid it is capable of mimicking many sounds, such as the screech of a hawk and it emits just such a screech which immediately scatters its fellow jays to the wind. Then the clever bird descends and enjoys the feast all to itself. Is there any explanation other than thinking?

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]]>Thanks to our readers, the Natural Dog Training site is full of fantastic questions and interesting scenarios. We are continuing to develop the site in order to nurture this dynamic, growing community, and hope to provide more and more resources to improve your learning experiences with NDT. At the moment, we realize that there are often questions or comments that don’t quite have a place within the articles, and so we’ve created this post for that exact purpose.

Please feel free to come here and leave a comment about your experiences, a question about your dog’s behavior, something that you’re stuck on, or something you’ve accomplished. In short, if you’re going through the site, and have something to say that doesn’t quite fit elsewhere – this is the place! We hope this will make your reading experience a little easier, and we’ll continue to develop the tools you need to Keep on Pushing!

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]]>The physical center of gravity is the kernel of a dog’s self and a dog’s sense of it is activated by external forces and sources, specifically when dealing with other beings, it is activated by eye contact. This is because a state of attention is composed of two beams, the external focal gaze by which the dog looks outward, and also an internal subliminal beam by which the dog looks inward on the body’s physical center of gravity. These two beams are inseparable from any state of attention since mastering the mechanics of motion to get things the dog wants is the primal imprint it absorbs in the first weeks of life. Whatever a dog wants, becomes imprinted onto its physical center-of-gravity during the early phases of life, and this imprint is the basis of every social interaction thereafter and is subsequently reinforced. The body mechanics of locomotion become the template for complex social interactions. (This may seem hard to believe, but I read somewhere that the sensory systems related to physical motions are the sensory basis for the human conceptualization of time. Piaget posited that a child first understands time as a function of a physical distance to be traveled. Likewise a dog’s apprehension of another being is first and foremost a function of that being’s movement and orientation around its physical center of gravity.)

Thus, when another being looks at a dog, this stare travels into and within the dog along the track of this subliminal beam, the force of attraction between them amplifying its strength in the dog’s consciousness so that the dog experiences being the object-of-attention just as if a physical force has displaced its physical center of gravity. The object-of-attention feels knocked off balance and this stimulates the dog’s central nervous system. (This is why dogs are electrified by the sound of their names. It’s because our focused energy when we say their name is synonymous with our stare and doubles up exponentially on the strength of the subliminal beam of attention.)

The dog perceives being looked at (or called) just as if it is being pushed, just as if its mother is knocking it over and rolling it around on the ground. It’s a force of accelleration, a degree of momentum that demands a terminus. And because its body/mind is constructed so that the electro-chemical pressure in its Big-Brain has to be digested in its little-brain wave function, it also feels a pull towards that which knocked it off balance. So the dog climbs up into the lap of Christine on the couch to get as close as possible to her eyes and then licks her lips and face for the bodily essence (tears/saliva) that is an emotional ground for the sensation of displacement caused by eye contact. Thus a dog can satisfy being pushed off center by being pulled toward a beings’ essence. This will of course trigger regurgitation in the adult wolf toward the cub that mobs it, but this isn’t why the cub is attracted (initially) to the adult’s mouth.

Furthermore, when the dog’s physical center of gravity is displaced by being the object of attention thus creating a “force” of attraction, the dog will necessarily experience resistance as it attempts to ground out this energy of attraction. (Even if it merely must travel over smooth flat ground toward a willing recipient of its advances.)

It thereby acquires unresolved emotion as a physical memory of the experience.

Unresolved emotion as physical memory accretes around the physical center-of-gravity thus producing the “emotional center of gravity” {e-cog = p-cog + physical memory of motion} that is then projected onto complex objects of attraction so that the physical memory of experience is automatically projected onto the complex form of things, such as another dog.

If the hunger circuitry is stronger than the balance, then the dog will experience a magnetic state of attunement with the complex object of attraction.

But if balance is stronger, then there will be an electrostatic kind of interaction.

Thus the dog is projecting its “self” onto other things and if it can ingest its “self” by grounding out with this other being, then these two individuals can ultimately form one “emotional body,” what we otherwise recognize as a profound emotional bond.

What’s amazing is that the kernel of a dog’s self is immaterial, it doesn’t actually exist, there’s no physical center-of-gravity organ or structure, we can’t ask a doctor to surgically remove our center mass, not to mention that it can move anywhere in the body therefore releasing via Pavlovian conditioning naturally produced opiates. Yet everything about an animal’s anatomy, physiology and neurology evolved in response to this immaterial kernel that constantly recapitulates in the animal’s body/mind to form complex social structures. The physical center-of-gravity is how consciousness interfaces with nature in order to organize life into a network so that new energy is continually added back into the network.

The most powerful and deepest physical memory of the physical center-of-gravity is in the deep gut/loin region because in the first days of life the rear legs of the newborn pup were a useless drag on forward motion, like an anchor the pup had to drag around. In adult life, this area will be the “pivot” point of the poised position so that the dog is free to go in any direction. This deep seated imprint is important since this region is proximal to the genitals and deep hunger pangs and these faculties of arousal will be the means of aligning magnetically (sensually) with complex beings later in its life.